Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  I took a shelf board down from the wall and sat with it balanced on my knees, to hold the paper. The words had been made already in my head, but I wrote them very slowly in the handwriting I had learned to copy from that dead Frenchman’s letters, careful to think just how each word must be drawn on the sheet of paper.

  To General Toussaint Louverture

  from his Captain, Riau

  My General it is true that for desertion the punishment is Death. Your Captain Riau does not have fear to Die. But a Dead Man cannot serve his People and I have come back of my free will to serve. I pray you let my life and my death also if it be on a field of battle serve my people and their Cause.

  I am your servant

  Captain Riau

  When the letter was finished and the ink was dry, I folded it two times and dripped candlewax to hold it shut and wrote Toussaint’s name on the other side. Then I beat on the door until someone grunted on the other side, and I slipped the letter through the crack beneath the door. Outside it was night, or must have been. When I pinched the candle out, there was no light at all and I lay on the floorboards and slept like I had been shot already.

  They came for me with muskets and bayonets, and Moyse was not there nor anyone I knew, so I thought I would be shot anyway, maybe. It was just dawn, with the mist rising from the square before the church. I would go beneath the waters maybe without meeting Toussaint again, I thought, but then I saw him sitting beneath the canvas where Moyse had been before.

  Toussaint wore his yellow mouchwa têt like always and his general’s hat was on the table beside the letter of Captain Riau. Now he wore the French uniform, and he had a big red plume above the white feathers in his hat, but everything else about him was the same as it had been. Riau’s thumbprint in the wax seal of the letter had been broken all the way across, and when I saw that I felt fear, as if Riau’s head would be taken from his body after all, his feet torn off the earth forever.

  “You do credit to your tutors,” Toussaint said at last, with a tick in his voice as if he might laugh, but he did not. He looked up and down from me to the letter, with one of his eyebrows moving. Then he folded the letter and put it away inside his coat.

  “Well, my captain,” he said, and his voice made a bark. “Return to your troops!”

  Behind me the bayonets came down. I saluted Toussaint and walked away as stiff and straight-backed as I could, though for some little time my legs were weak, as if they were full of water instead of bone.

  I had thought Toussaint would put me to writing his letters again, because he always had need of others to write for him, and that was why I had made Captain Riau’s letter in that way which it was. But instead we all went out of Dondon that day, more than four thousand men altogether, to fight the Spanish whitemen in the high plain to the east. I believe that Toussaint might have been thinking that those Spanish would have left their towns unguarded from the north since they had sent their soldiers to help the English at Verrettes. But they had left soldiers enough along the way we went, and they had made ready for a big fight.

  Above Saint Michel and Saint Raphael the Spanish whitemen had made a strong place dug into a mountain where the road had a sharp turn, and they had also dug a ditch to bring water across the road to block it, with many cannons aimed over the road from behind this ditch. If they were surprised to see Toussaint coming from that direction, they did not look like it.

  If Halaou or Boukman had led that fight, our people would have been killed by thousands, running at the cannons behind that ditch. This time was not like fighting for a hûngan, though. It was to be in an army of ants.

  Toussaint divided the men into three. One line of foot soldiers went around the back side of the mountain to wait for the Spanish on the road behind. Another line of foot soldiers climbed up the side of that mountain out of sight of the Spanish so to come down on their fort from above. Toussaint himself stayed on the road in front of the cannons, with some hundreds of horse soldiers.

  The horse Riau had taken from the men of Jean-François had been given to another man by Moyse before Toussaint had come, and someone else had taken Ti Bonhomme while Riau was in the guard house waiting to be shot, so I was sent with the foot soldiers who climbed the mountain above the Spanish fort. I was happy enough not to be riding with Toussaint that day anyway, when I saw what was going to happen. For a little time it was quiet, with our men climbing under the sun, and Toussaint with the horsemen waiting below on the road just out of reach of the cannons, and the two lines of foot soldiers going around and over that mountain like ants on a sugar hill. But then as we came out on the heights above the fort where the Spanish could see us, Toussaint’s horsemen stirred, and his long sword flashed, no bigger than a pin as it looked from the mountain. Then they charged.

  Toussaint had to do this thing so the Spanish could not turn their cannons to shoot at us as we came down. I, Riau, could understand the need inside my head, but it was very bad to watch it. The cannons were loaded with mitraille instead of the big round balls, and when they fired, these little pieces of metal flew everywhere and hurt a lot of people. Toussaint charged two times and was turned back, and both times many of his men were shot down from their horses. I saw the horses were being torn to pieces also, which almost was worse, and some few of them broke their legs trying to cross the ditch that was filled with water.

  When we came down from the mountainside, we found that the Spanish had dug a ditch all the way around their fort, so we could not come in so easily. But Toussaint led another charge, spurring up the stallion Bel Argent, who jumped all the way over the ditch this time, and then the Spanish broke where they were fighting us, so we all came among them together. Since it was too close for shooting, I began to cut them down with my coutelas, but there was no spirit in my head this time. It was more like I was cutting cane in the field at Bréda.

  When the Spanish starting running back down the road toward Santo Domingo, the other line of our foot soldiers caught them as they tried to run away. A very great many of them were killed, and left their bodies lying everywhere in the road, so we passed a lot of dead men that way as we went on to the towns beyond. In the fort there were men who would not surrender, and Toussaint ordered them killed with swords. I had seen his mood to be softer when he won a fight, but he was hard and tight today, after losing so many men and horses to mitraille.

  Both Saint Raphael and Saint Michel we burned to the ground. Toussaint ordered this because he had not enough men to hold those places, and he did not want our enemies to use them. Here on the high plain the Spanish pastured their mules and their cows, and Toussaint sent these herds across the mountains to the west. We had captured a lot of guns also, and powder which we needed even worse, and the cannons from the forts, and those too he sent back over the mountains. After we burned the towns, and when the ashes cooled enough, we broke up the parts that would not burn until not one stone or brick was still stuck to another. Also we burned whatever herdsman’s huts that we found scattered on the plain.

  To see those houses burning brought pleasure to Riau, but it was not the same blind, blood-drunk joy as when we first rose to burn all the plantations of the northern plain. At night were celebrations and dancing and the loa came down to many but not to me. I felt the loosening in my head, but I held to myself and would not let go—it seemed I wanted my own head for thinking but what I wanted to think about I could not say. In the night I dreamed I was a zombi working in a zombi crew, cutting cane like a slave again and loading it onto wagons. When the cane was cut, the stalk ran blood instead of sugar juice, and when I had put cane on the wagon, I saw it become the bodies of dead men. I looked over my left shoulder and saw Chacha who Riau and Biassou had made a zombi, doing the same work with Riau who was a zombi too . . .

  Toussaint did not go to the ceremonies either. When the Spanish towns were all destroyed, we went very fast across the high plain and into the mountains above Mirebalais, where Toussaint had the last fort of his line
, and then back along the inside bank of the river, toward the sea. All the time we went very fast. At one post or another Toussaint would leave a few men or exchange them. On the other side of the river the British were still in Verrettes, but on the side where we were, above Petite Rivière, Toussaint’s colored officer Blanc Cassenave was finishing that fort which the English had begun. After we had passed that place, Toussaint went on to Gonaives, but Riau was sent with a small party to Ennery and to Habitation Thibodet.

  When we had come there, I wanted to go right away to the ajoupa where Merbillay and Caco stayed, but then there came a thought which held me back. Maybe the new man had come to her again, already, either with our party now or at some other time. So I stayed away, helping to fire the forge down by the stable, because many horses had thrown shoes in all that hard fast riding. When night came, I did not go to eat with the others, but took a mango and a soursop away to eat in the dark below the coffee trees. Later on when I came back toward the camp, I watched from outside the fire circles. I saw Merbillay get up from one fire, with her mouchwa têt wrapped high and tight. The new child in her belly showed very much now, and her face was full and round and sleek. The man who put his hand on her far shoulder to walk by her was the one with the scars. They went together toward the ajoupa with Caco skipping behind them as if all this was usual to him.

  What Riau had wondered about before was now true, because this new man had been with us all the time at the burning of the Spanish towns. I even knew his name, which was Guiaou. His scars were terrible, all around his trunk and on his head, like a big djab had bitten into him and chewed and spat him out because after all he did not like the taste. Guiaou had been in the fighting with Riau at the Spanish fort too, among Toussaint’s foot soldiers, who climbed part of the mountain to come down from behind. He had fought well, half outside of himself, as if he was in a dream or underwater.

  Now he had put the new baby into Merbillay, and he would lie beside her in the ajoupa all night. And my Caco, Pierre Toussaint who I had named, was with them in the ajoupa like he was their child and not Riau’s. Riau felt angry at this, but the sadness which came after was more great. I might slip into the ajoupa and kill the new man while he slept, as I had crept many times into the camps of whitemen in the hills to kill them with my knife. Or I might fight him when he woke, fight with the baton, to the death. That way it would be less sure what would happen, and Toussaint would be angry if he heard of it because he did not want his soldiers to waste themselves in fighting each other with the baton.

  All these ideas I saw from a little distance, outside the head of Riau. They were not part of me at all, only things which might or might not happen. I did not know at all what I wanted to do.

  I went away to look for Bouquart. When I found him, he was with the housemaid Zabeth, under the hedge of oranges in the dark. Zabeth was shy to see me come, and she pulled away and went back to the grand’-case. Bouquart did not seem to mind this very much. He smiled and took my hand. Bouquart was admired by many women here at Ennery because he was a big, fine man who could run faster and jump higher than other big, fine men, now his nabots had been struck off. I thought, while we were walking, after all it would not be a bad life for Riau, to go about as a blacksmith cutting iron off people. To be free was a great thing, but to free someone was greater.

  I was thinking of this when we passed near the fires and Bouquart looked surprised to see my captain’s coat, because he was only an ordinary soldier. Guiaou did not have any captain’s coat either, I thought, or captain’s power to tell men what to do. Guiaou did not even have a shirt, it seemed. But that was a whiteman way of thinking.

  Bouquart knew all the talk of the camp, because so many different women liked him, and from Zabeth he knew the talk of the grand’case, too. A quarrel had happened among the white people, he told me, after the colored woman Nanon had gone away with her child. A colored officer had come from Le Cap after Nanon, and the white mistress of the house had made her go away with him, or so Zabeth had told Bouquart. But afterward Tocquet had become very angry with his woman, and had gone away himself, and her own child Sophie was always sad, because she and Nanon’s boy Paul had been like brother and sister. Now the white mistress was sorry for what she had done, and she lay in bed until afternoon some days, Zabeth said, or even until dark, crying and calling her little girl to her. So the happiness had left that house and misery lay on it like a sickness.

  That night I stayed in the ajoupa Bouquart had made, and for many nights. Sometimes I was alone there, if Bouquart went with a woman. There was not any fighting near Ennery then, and with Toussaint away there was not very much training or drilling either. The French whiteman officers Riau had known at this camp before had all gone to the fighting it seemed, if they had not been killed.

  I stayed with Bouquart at night. By day I would sometimes see Merbillay, but I did not try to speak to her. I knew that she knew that Riau was there in the camp with her and Guiaou—let her think of that whatever she would. One day when she had gone off to the provision grounds, I went to that ajoupa and took down the banza I had made from the ridgepole where it hung. I struck one note softly with my thumb and bent the string to make it cry. Then I saw Caco looking at me shyly from the ajoupa doorway. I curled my fingers to him, and he came to me.

  I took the banza to Bouquart’s ajoupa and played it there in the darkness after night came, bending the strings and beating my palm on the skin head. I knew that she and Guiaou could hear it where they lay. In the days Caco would come to me and we did many things together, inside the camp or going outside of it into the bush. I thought that sometimes Guiaou was watching us together too, though I did not see him. There were plenty of other women around that camp, but I did not want any of them.

  In front of the grand’case the yard had been made soft with grasses, and flowers floating in a pool, and the ordinary soldiers were kept from walking there, but as an officer Riau came and went as he would, on his soldier business. So it was when the doctor had come back to Habitation Thibodet, I saw him on the gallery of the house. At first I was not sure that it was he, but when he had taken off his hat I knew—there was the bald, rust-colored head with its peeling skin, the small beard coming to a point. He had come from Gonaives, and was still dusty from the road, and he was quarreling with the white mistress of the house who was his sister. I stood below the bougainvillea vines that hung down from the gallery rail and heard the ending of their talk.

  “Madame ma sœur,” the doctor said. They must have been arguing a long time for such an anger to come into his tone. “When I first came to this country I searched it from one end to the other, looking for you. Now you move me to wonder if it would not have been better for all of us if I had never found you.”

  The face of the whitewoman crunched up like wadded cloth. There were red spots all over the pale skin of her face now, because she did not keep herself clean anymore—Zabeth said, she almost could not live without the man. Inside the house the little girl began to cry. She was often unhappy now, infected with the mother’s misery. The whitewoman turned away from the doctor, pressing one hand across her bare throat, and went limping into the shadows of the house.

  Barefoot, I went up the stairs, hesitating at each step. I had my coat of a French soldier but I had not yet got any boots, so my feet did not make any noise as I climbed. Still I had not grown used to entering a big plantation house by the front door. Riau would never have done so, not as a slave at Bréda, and not as a maroon either unless perhaps he came to kill and burn. Captain Riau of the French army could come to the door like a blanc. I stood at last on the gallery floor, but the doctor did not see me.

  He had sat down at the table, and over his shoulder I saw him looking into his ouanga, the piece of mirror he cupped in his palm, small so that it only reflected his eye. He gripped the edges of it so hard it cut into the creases of his hand. After a time he put it down and passed his blunt fingers over his face, then took from his pocke
t a small silver snuffbox and set this on the table near the mirror shard. He looked at both of these things as if he did not know at all what they were.

  I thought of everything I knew about the doctor. He was a very strange whiteman. Sometimes Riau had even wondered if he were not a man of Guinée who by witchcraft was poured into the skin of a blanc. Some few other whitemen were a little bit this way, but all of them were priests of Jesus, and this doctor was no priest. Riau had known Doctor Hébert since Toussaint first captured him in raiding the plantations of the north. Toussaint had set him to be my writing master for a time, and had taught him how to be a doktè-fey. And whatever the doctor could see with his eye, he could reach with a bullet from his gun as easily as if he was touching it with his finger, but he did not care anything for this gift, and would rather heal than kill if he had the choice. He seemed smooth inside where whitemen always were jagged, and for that, Riau was glad to see him now, although he was in trouble.

  When he saw me, the knots all over his face went calm, and he stood up, smiling as he spoke my name, and put his hands on my shoulders. I touched him gently on the elbows with my hands, and followed him to the chair he drew back for me to sit. But when he looked at the things on the table, the trouble came back into his eyes.

  I saw his one eye floating in that piece of mirror, and I thought that it must be watching me too. I thought how shadows and reflections in a mirror may return the movements of the men who walk on the earth. Riau had his own trouble also, and what if Caco had vanished away to an unknown place, like Nanon’s boy, Paul? I did not know what to do about my trouble, but now I thought maybe I could reach across the mirror and work on the other side.